ChatGPT is starting to experience the “TikTok effect” first hand. And no, we don’t mean that the AI is hugely popular around the world (which it is), but that several countries have already taken it to task for alleged privacy and data protection concerns.
The first country to speak out was Italy, which formally requested OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, to block Italian users’ access to the AI, due to concerns from Garante, the Italian data protection authority, regarding the provenance of the data used to train the artificial intelligence, something that could even be in violation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. OpenAI agreed, and they are now being investigated in Italy.
But that’s not the end of it. We jump across the pond to find that Canada has also begun investigating the company behind ChatGPT. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada announced this week that it has opened an investigation into OpenAI “in response to a complaint alleging the collection, use and disclosure of personal information without consent.”
ChatGPT is an all-rounder tool, capable of automatically generating texts of all kinds with a very high accuracy. Moreover, it is an exceptional chatbot, with which you can have conversations as if it were a human, receiving written answers with natural language.
But ChatGPT’s great versatility and accuracy does not come from nowhere, as the AI needs data to train itself with, and more and more voices are asking where this data comes from and how exactly it is processed: “We have to keep pace with the rapid technological advances and keep ahead of them, and that is one of my main goals,” said Philippe Dufresne, the Privacy Commissioner.
So far, Canada has neither blocked access to AI nor requested OpenAI to do so (at least publicly). However, knowing how these situations tend to escalate in the technological world, something tells us that all this is just the beginning of many more investigations and future regulations of artificial intelligences.
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